Undead Rain (Book 3): Lightning (Fighting the Living Dead) by Shaun Harbinger

knew that as soon as we entered the building, they wouldn’t be quiet anymore.

Chapter Ten
    W e arrived at the main gate at the same time as a light drizzle began falling. I hadn’t noticed that the sky, which had been clear earlier, was now murky. Even the moon, which had been so bright when the Chinook had dropped us off in the field, was partly obscured from our sight by dark clouds. Typical. Just as we were about to enter a dangerous area, the night got dark. It would make it much more difficult to see if there were zombies or hybrids wandering around inside the compound.
    The gate was closed, but when Sam got out of the camper van and went to check if it was locked, it swung open. Sam waited while Tanya drove us inside before closing the gate again. When he got back into the vehicle, I asked him why had had closed it.
    “We don’t know what’s in those woods, man. We don’t want something following us in here.”
    I nodded. His argument was sound. On a quiet night like this, even the gentle idling noise made by the camper van’s engine would drift through the trees, attracting whatever was in those woods. It might be a good idea to barricade the gate somehow, but then we could be locking ourselves in with a much worse monster than anything outside the compound.
    The guard station was a single-story brick building with lighted windows, sitting across the parking lot from the main building. A few cars were parked in the lot, waiting for owners who would never return. The guard station had a single door, which had a glass panel set into it at eye level. Sam checked it out, peering through the glass before giving us the thumbs-up signal. “It’s clear,” he said, opening the door.
    Tanya switched off the engine and sudden silence descended. That silence seemed to be laced with an anticipation of danger, as if something was going to come quietly out of the night and take us one by one, like an owl swooping noiselessly onto its prey, razor sharp claws bared.
    I had to stop thinking like that or I was going to spook myself to the point that every tiny noise was going to make me jump.
    We got out of the van and walked through the cold drizzle to the guard station.
    It was warm inside the small building, the radiators on the wall throwing out more than enough heat to combat the chill of the night. There was a single main room, a restroom, and a storeroom that held a filing cabinet and a coffee machine.
    The main room had a row of a six monitors affixed to one of the walls, each with a number 1-6 painted on the wall above it, with a row of desks and chairs beneath, each desk holding a small control panel. The monitors were switched on, displaying black and white images of the parking lot, the perimeter fence, and various corridors that I assumed were inside the main building. A row of walkie-talkies sat in a charger on one of the desks.
    “The main building looks deserted,” Jax said, watching the monitors.
    It was true that the screens seemed to show an empty building, but they only showed corridors. The only room interiors shown were two small rooms that looked like the mirrored room I had been held in at Alpha One.
    “There are only six monitors,” I said. “That’s a huge building, so these screens aren’t showing everything in there. The guards must select which cameras to monitor using the control panels.”
    I took a seat at one of the desks and looked at the controls. There were two rows of white buttons beneath labels that denoted which camera they were related to. There was a small joystick that I assumed controlled the cameras’ movements. There was also a button that said Audio with an On and Off position. It was currently turned to off, and the button for the Level 1 Main Corridor was depressed. I clicked the button next to it, labeled Level 5 Elevators , and one of the screens changed the image to show three closed elevator doors and a section of corridor. The camera was obviously set high up on the